Melancholic jazz enthusiast Charlie Resnick's new outing - all the usual failed relationships and passions for strong coffee and exotic food - proves with no little ease that familiarity need not breed contempt. Six novels and two faithful TV adaptations, and Harvey's detective seems cemented in place, inevitable as it is that he's now inseparable from Tom Wilkinson's nicely mannered screen performance.

Christmas. The DI's team are called to investigate a missing persons when one Nancy Phelan disappears from an office party. Suspicion falls immediately upon the weak-willed hill-climbing boyfriend seen talking to the missing woman, and the violent, abusive young father Gary, who briefly held Nancy hostage in her office just before her disappearance. But taunting tapes sent to police gradually link to an earlier kidnapping where a demanded ransom masked nothing more than sadistic entertainment. And that victim was never seen again.

While their author might not agree, the early Resnick novels do suffer from over-worked plots, and consequently books like Off Minor and especially Cutting Edge, while immensely readable, tend to struggle under ultimately rather ridiculous, gimmicky manoeuvres. What the second - Rough Treatment - and last year's terrific Wasted Years proved was that there is no real substitute for well drawn characters - Resnick's superiors, the beery, sexist younger members of his team - a small but tightly turned story, and a real sense of place. Harvey's vision of Nottingham, from its dislocated city centre to its crumbling estates, is both vivid and authentic.

The author allows his all too patient policeman to have another of his occasional flings - with Phelan's flatmate - and it doesn't give much away to say it's as ill-starred as ever. Harvey has a quiet way with the catastrophe that is Resnick - his failed marriage and all - that is a little too convincing, and the reader wonders when he will eventually realise that home life is destined to be just him, the jazz records and those cats. Harvey also gives a starring role to the sympathetic, mousy Lynn Kellogg - the only woman on the DI's team - and wraps the whole thing in more of a whydunnit-and-will-they-do-it-again? than anything Agatha Christie would recognise.

And that ending? While it's always nice to find an author with the economy to keep things terse, Harvey again takes things to almost absurd extremes. Still, that notwithstanding, his last two books are first-class examples of their type, and on this evidence it's hard to see Resnick outstaying his welcome on page or screen in the foreseeable future.